For summary, they are a popular radio in the 90's used by Fire, EMS, Police and power companies in Britain and around europe that are very moddable and easily reprogrammed to ham bands.

The format of the EEPROM channel data has been documented and a alternative firmware was written by an amaetur PA4DEN which provides VFO and other ham-radio features on any Fm1100 radio which has the dot-matrix display keypad installed. They're normally 25 W and are in different varieties for between 50 mhz to 70cms.

Wonder if anybody here has them or is interested in them? I have a few from car boot sales and the like.

I was working on a software project for editing channels and configurations of these radios through their 2KB 24C16 eeprom binaries.

Here is a preview of it:

Most functions are written into code and into the command line version of the program, but I was still working on transitioning it to all work with the GUI. The software is written in python and uses AppJar/TKinter for the GUI.

I had plenty of them for 2m and 70cm years ago. Large front, small front etc. I had 3 psu Units and this portable unit as well. Nice Radios but I do not think it makes sense to invest much time into them.

I still have the original programmer, the pc board to program them and 2 radios. I admit your software looks interesting. Do you sell it?

I want to release it as open source or at least freeware since it is primarily for my personal use as a personal for-fun project, I think that such software being free may encourage more people to re-use and recycle these old radios instead of throwing them out, and maybe increase their popularity. That is my aim, anyways.

Nice that you still have the original programmer, wow, that is hard to get.

YES!! I'm happy that there is something "still alive" about this device.
I'm interested 'cause I'm dealing with two FM1000 used as VHF repeater, and of course I have to understand how EEPROM content is stored.
I'm also working in a software similar to yours (using Qt/C++), which is available on Github.

I had several problems understanding how EEPROM data is saved. In your application the channel table have a lot of options for each channel, including tx power and custom CTCSS.
Can you please share your knowledge about how EEPROM data is stored?

Nice! Glad there's someone else who shares the same strong interest for these radios. Yes I can. The screenshot there was not extracting the TX parameter's details, instead just displaying the TX hex code un-decoded as I didn't code that in yet, making the program successfully import and export functioning BIN files and importing/exporting channels from a CSV was a higher priority.
Anyways, here is a summary of what I have curated from what I've found and what I currently know

To read the CTCSS code, just convert the hex byte to a decimal, that decimal represents an index in a table which corresponds to a tone frequency. So for example CTCSS of 01 = 67.0 Hz. Here is my python dictionary for it.

TX power codes are a bit more complicated. Here is my documentation that I wrote for myself on it. Note that this isn't my final revision of the notes so there may be a mistake somewhere, take it with a grain of salt.

A friend suggests me the site of F5JTZ for frequencies, CTCSS and TOT features.
TOT is at offset 0x719 and it can be a value between 0 and 255, where values greater than 0 mean how many seconds you can keep the PTT pushed. Zero, of course, means that the feature is disables.

I've also discovered that the second byte in the EEPROM (offset 0x01) seems to be the "startup" channel number. I'm still making some tests to be sure of it.

I'm adding features to my software based on your informations. You will be quoted into the "about" widget...

The TX timeout and startup channel/channel persistence settings are some of the things documented by David Craig's RADCOM article, there is also a key beep setting (as seen in the radio settings panel of my screenshot)

Is the reference oscillator division changeable in FM1k ? Sometimes it could be useful, if a set could be made to operate on a random frequency, instead of integer x times 6.25 kHz. Checking beacons, for example.

Hi Bozzy I see you used to repair FM1100 radios, so did I. I used to work for Pye telecommunications in 1970 and retired 38 years later. I have modified a number of them for the 4,2 , and 70cm amateur bands.

02DC16 wrote:Hi Bozzy I see you used to repair FM1100 radios, so did I. I used to work for Pye telecommunications in 1970 and retired 38 years later. I have modified a number of them for the 4,2 , and 70cm amateur bands.

02DC16 wrote:Hi Bozzy I see you used to repair FM1100 radios, so did I. I used to work for Pye telecommunications in 1970 and retired 38 years later. I have modified a number of them for the 4,2 , and 70cm amateur bands.

Dave GI8LCJ

Hi Dave

Yes, a cracking radio the FM1000 range, technically is was FM1200 radio's I worked on. I had dealings with a couple of guys at Cambridge, Malcolm S and Todd S, you may remember them?

I found my visits to the factory fascinating, real "White Smock" wearing people in the factory. However it had changed to Simoco when I used to visit.